This section introduces aspects that may be helpful to facilitate a better understanding of the inventions. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art. Any techniques or schemes described herein as existing or possible are presented as background for the present invention, but no admission is made thereby that these techniques and schemes were heretofore commercialized, or known to others besides the inventors.
A mobile device, such as a mobile handset, or more generally user equipment (UE), may connect via cellular access points to an internet protocol (IP) transport layer such as an evolved packet core (EPC) to communicate with other networked devices. To reduce loading of cellular network access points, such as E-UTRAN nodes (eNodeB), such devices may transition from a connection with a cellular access point to a connection with a wireless LAN (WLAN) access point that provides a data path between the IP transport layer and the UE. This transition requires several communication steps between the UE and servers within the EPC infrastructure. These steps may be time consuming, thereby requiring significant system resources when the actions of many UEs are considered as a whole.